https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.html

Hadley Wickham's

A layered grammar of graphics

[layered-gramm]

  * Hadley Wickham.
  * A layered grammar of graphics.
  * Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, vol. 19, no.
    1, pp. 3-28, 2010.

Download: pre-print | via doi


A grammar of graphics is a tool that enables us to concisely describe
the components of a graphic. Such a grammar allows us to move beyond
named graphics (e.g., the ``scatterplot'') and gain insight into the
deep structure that underlies statistical graphics. This paper builds
on Wilkinson (2006), describing extensions and refinements developed
while building an open source implementation of the grammar of
graphics for R, ggplot2.

The topics in this paper include an introduction to the grammar by
working through the process of creating a plot, and discussing the
components that we need. The grammar is then presented formally and
compared to Wilkinson's grammar, highlighting the hierarchy of
defaults, and the implications of embedding a graphical grammar into
a programming language. The power of the grammar is illustrated with
a selection of examples that explore different components and their
interactions, in more detail. The paper concludes by discussing some
perceptual issues, and thinking about how we can build on the grammar
to learn how to create graphical ``poems''.

@Article{layered-grammar,
  author = {Hadley Wickham},
  doi = {10.1198/jcgs.2009.07098},
  journal = {Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics},
  number = {1},
  pages = {3-28},
  selected = {TRUE},
  title = {A layered grammar of graphics},
  volume = {19},
  year = {2010},
  bdsk-url-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1198/jcgs.2009.07098},
}

 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Built with R, the bibtex package, and brew. Styled with skeleton and
subtlepatterns. Hosted on github.